


Answer Echoes, Dying, Dying

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: Anger, Difficult Relationships, Discussions of Morality, Friendship, Gen, Magic, Pre-Canon, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 22:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21088823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: As a child Caliban finds and befriends a magic tree. When he is older, he comes to understand just who that tree was, and what that friendship really meant.





	Answer Echoes, Dying, Dying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lizimajig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizimajig/gifts).

When Caliban was small, he found the magic tree. It looked rather like an ordinary oak, the kind that grew across the island, with a great, spreading crown, grown somewhat crooked under the relentless onslaught of the ocean winds. There was a nice hollow in its roots, of the perfect size for a small boy to climb into, and there Caliban rested on the days when he ran wild over the island, glorying in freedom. But unlike most of the trees on the island, the magic tree talked. 

He discovered this on a rainy day when he did not have enough energy to run back to his mother and her scoldings. Instead, he crawled into the oak hollow as he was accustomed to, and watched the rain dripping through the canopy and greening the grass outside. It was warm in his small cocoon, and Caliban was at peace. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” said the tree, quite suddenly. 

Caliban jumped. 

“Who’s there?” he cried. 

The voice didn’t sound like his mother or any of her spirits. It wasn’t raging, wasn’t spiteful, wasn’t full up with bitterness and want. But it was curious. 

“It’s me, silly.” 

Caliban looked around, and still saw nothing. 

“The tree,” the voice said helpfully. 

“But you’re a tree. Trees don’t talk.” 

“Maybe I’m a magic tree, or the spirit of a tree. Like your mother’s spirits, only I don’t belong to her. I belong to me. And also to the tree.” 

Caliban laughed at that. 

“Every spirit on this island is my mother’s,” he said. 

It was, to some extent, true. Sycorax had bound every spirit she could find to herself when the men from the far-off-place dropped her on the island’s barren shore before Caliban’s birth. She stewed and schemed and rebuilt the power she had lost, and every day, she told Caliban that the day would soon come when they left this barren rock and returned in triumph to the place called Home where they belonged. The Home that had wronged her. 

“Almost there, my son,” she whispered as she rocked Caliban to sleep. “We won’t be here much longer, because we don’t belong here, with these damned spirits and these damned rocks and vines. We should be around other people. Our own people. This island isn’t our Home.” 

But Caliban had never known people besides Sycorax, and he’d never known a life beyond the island. He was willing to listen to the magic tree, and to make a friend who wasn’t people, whatever they were. So he decided that maybe, if the tree decided to answer him, he would leave off talking about his mother and her spirit-servants. 

“Not all of us belong to Sycorax,” said the magic tree. “Some of us fear her or hate her.” 

“What about me?” Caliban asked. “Do any of the other magic trees on the island say that they fear and hate me?” 

The tree rumbled out a laugh.  
“I don’t even know your name, little master. How could I hate you?” 

“I’m Caliban,” said Caliban. “I’m going to inherit all my mother’s spirits when I’m older, unless we go Home. I don’t really know what Home is, or where it's found, though. Only that my mother wants to go back there before she dies. She says that a lot.” 

“Your mother’s likely missing you, Caliban,” said the magic tree. “Look, the rain’s slowing. Run along now.” 

Caliban had to admit that the tree was right. He jumped up and dashed out into the light mist, the meadow, and the breeze from the sea. Halfway across the meadow, he turned to look back at the tree. It had, he thought, a trustworthy air to it, like he could tell it anything. 

“Goodbye, tree!” Caliban yelled. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow!” 

He ran all the way back to Sycorax, who scolded him, served him dinner, and told him stories of Home. She was in an unusually wistful mood that day. Perhaps the mist rising over the sea beneath their clifftop dwelling had wafted into her soul and made her melancholy. 

“It’s a beautiful city with clear blue skies,” she said, as if she was hoping to make Caliban love Home as much as she did. “And public baths, so that a person can be properly clean, not only somewhat clean the way we can be here.” 

In their little stone chambers, they bathed in a metal tub full of water Sycorax heated with magic, or they ran into the sea on hot, sunny days. Those days, with the seagulls screaming and the white foam cresting on the glittering blue waves, were the only days when Caliban saw his mother smile, and when she bathed in the sea, it was as if she had become a little girl again. Listening to her now, he wondered if a public bath was something like another sea, and that was why Sycorax was so wistful speaking of them, and so happy dancing in the ocean. 

She went on, still looking far-off, and Caliban tried to listen intently, because that was what she would want. 

“When we get Home, we’ll have a house with a courtyard, and a door as blue as the sky, and a lemon tree. And women from all over the city will come to me for help with their greatest problems, and you will be my help, little Caliban.” 

She went on, not so much telling stories as outlining plans. But Caliban didn’t care about public baths or houses with blue doors to match blue skies. He cared about the magic tree, and the island. He loved his mother, but this was his world. He could not see how to slot himself into hers. And so, Caliban hoped two hopes: the first that he might learn to fit into Sycorax’s world, and the second that he would never leave his island. 

The next day, he went to the magic tree. This time, the sunlight dappled the green leaves with fishlike patterns dancing to and fro in the light sea winds, and the magic tree told Caliban pleasant stories of far-off lands and tricksy air-spirits who danced all day on the breeze. He was enchanted and lay on his back listening, the summer passing in a dream around him, forgetting all his mother’s tales of Home. 

***

When Sycorax died a winter or so later, it was the magic tree who staunched Caliban’s tears with kind words. All through the storms of winter, it protected him and told him stories, and made him realize that even if he never got Home (and would it even be Home without his mother there?) the island would always accept him. It was his island, and it would be his only place, first in his heart, the way Home was for Sycorax. 

And so, the seasons fled and circled, and Caliban learned to live with the plants and spirits, and listened to the magic tree, which sometimes sounded as wistful as his mother. And Caliban, in talking, in discussing, in spending all his time beneath the oak tree’s spreading branches, realized that he had never asked the magic tree’s name. 

“Ariel,” said the tree. “That is what I am.” 

And knowing the tree’s name, Caliban was content until the man landed on the shore. 

***

It had been a stormy night, and the wild waves lashed the shores with sickening swirls of kelp, and Caliban hid in the stone chambers, wishing for his mother and listening to the fretful whining of the wind. The lightning tore jagged edges in the sky outside the window, and Caliban burrowed himself tightly in his blankets, fearfully listening for tree-crackings, and hoping that Ariel would survive the storm. He’d seen pines bowled over by the fierce ocean winds, but Ariel always stood strong, and Caliban didn’t think he could bear losing Ariel as he had lost his mother. 

From the shore came a shouting, a wailing, and Caliban thought of vengeful spirits, ever remembering their time as his mother’s slaves. 

“Don’t kill me,” he whispered to the stormy dark, and fell at last into a fitful sleep. 

When he awoke, it was to someone rustling about in his house. There was someone there, someone who looked rather like Sycorax, in that he walked on two legs and was hunched over the hearth, trying to start a fire with some wet wood he’d brought in from the shore. Caliban saw him and nearly screamed, only to realize that there was a good possibility that the man was dangerous. Instead, he went back into his chamber and climbed out the open window, then dashed down the cliff-path towards Ariel. 

The shore was covered with driftwood and kelp, but sparkled in the new morning sun. The grass was damp and shining, and despite the hopeful cries of hungry gulls, Caliban still felt a creeping wrongness, the same creeping wrongness he’d felt when he saw the man in their kitchen. He hummed to dispel it, hoping that Ariel would speak words of kindness and charm to him. 

But when Caliban entered the meadow, he uttered a cry. Ariel did not stand proudly above the meadow any longer. The great oak lay in two pieces on the shattered grass, split down the middle as if by lightning, no more now than firewood. Caliban fell to his knees, retching. 

“Ariel, Ariel! No!” he cried, sobbing into his hands. 

It was in this manner, sobbing and alone, that Prospero found him, and picked him up. The man from the stone rooms, Caliban saw now, was very tall, with a gray beard and a tattered robe. He held Caliban like a sack of something foul and stinking, and wrinkled his nose when the boy thrashed. 

“You. Boy. Mine. Now,” said the man, and then a babble of foreign words to the thing which followed him, a man-shaped thing that floated, translucent, on the air. 

The spirit translated helpfully. 

“This man is Prospero, Duke of Milan. You are his servant now, and servant as well to his young daughter Miranda. He asks your name.” 

The voice was familiar, and Caliban, his face still wet with tears, felt some faint hope. 

“Ariel?” he asked. 

The spirit looked away. Was there guilt in this new Ariel’s eyes? 

“It is I.” 

And because Ariel was there, Caliban told Prospero everything. 

***

Later he’d hate himself for it, and curse in Prospero’s language, having forgotten most of his mother’s. For all his airs and graces, for all his pretenses at fairness, Prospero was cold and cruel. He’d asked Caliban’s name only to call him hagseed and little more than a foul beast, but Caliban could take it. He could curse with the best of them. What he couldn’t understand was why Ariel, who’d spoken of spirits who hated and feared Caliban’s mother, could stand by Prospero as a servant and feel no shame. 

“Why didn’t you hide me?” Caliban asked once, smarting from a beating, sobbing for his impossibly far-off childhood, now forever lost. 

Ariel had turned a sickly green, guilty all over. 

“Your mother imprisoned me. Prospero freed me. And you would have left me in that tree. What choice did I have?” 

“You’re still a slave, spirit,” Caliban spat. “It’s just your cage is golden now, is all.” 

“And would you have freed me to the winds, or left me in the tree your mother threw me in for your own amusement?” 

Caliban had no answer, only the memory of gold on the leaves. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this! Reading your prompts, I couldn't help but speculate about whether or not Caliban and Ariel were at least somewhat close before Prospero's arrival. And this is what appeared! 
> 
> Title is from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Princess".


End file.
